Tuesday, June 13, 2017

NBN Pork-barreling Worked

Research by Alizadeh and Farid (2017) found that pork-barreling by Australian politicians over the National Broadband Network (NBN)
worked. Voters who received early access to high speed broadband rewarded the party which provided this with their votes:

"An analysis of the voting behaviour in the 2007 and the 2010 Federal
elections shows a pattern in which the ALP held seats were the key
beneficiaries of the early NBN rollout. Moreover, the results suggests
that the Coalition held safe seats were the least likely to receive the
infrastructure. Diverse sub-patterns across the three states of New
South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria have been discussed in details.
However, the overall findings remain that the selection process for the
early NBN rollout was skewed up for potential political gains.

The paper then moves to the second question on whether the targeted
infrastructure provision worked and swung votes for the ALP in the
following 2013 Federal election. The analysis of the voting in the NBN
early rollout areas versus the rest of the country shows a clear
difference. While the ALP experienced an overall heavy negative swing
across the nation and lost the election, the negative shift was highly
mitigated in the NBN early release sites."

From Alizadeh and Farid, 2017.

I suggest the lesson from this is: when proposing tech policy, find some
aspect which offers short term political gain. Making appeals to the
national interest and long term benefit is of little relevance to
politicians aiming to win the next election. So how do we make changes
we think need to be made to Internet policy appealing to voters in the
short term and so therefore appealing to politicians?